2/04/2011 @ 9:30AM1,546 views

Using Crowdcasting To Find Treatments For The Paralyzed

An inspirational article from today’s New York Times highlights the intelligent use of open innovation to accelerate (hopefully) drug development – in this case, for the dreadful condition, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Prize4Life, an organization founded by Avichai Kremer and classmates at Harvard Business School after Kremer was diagnosed with ALS, seeks to accelerate research towards a cure by funding prize-based competitions. Dr. Seward Rutkove, a neurologist at Boston’s Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center, was recently awarded a $1M prize by Prize4Life for his development of an approach to more rapidly assess disease progression.

Two features of this accomplishment warrant particular consideration. First, Dr. Rutkove’s discovery emphasizes the potential value of open innovation in developing new medicines. Open innovation (as a colleague and I discussed recently in the Boston Globe) describes a set of approaches that seek solutions broadly, rather than from a pre-specified group of solvers, and recognizes that in the words of Sillicon Valley Pioneer Bill Joy, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

A prize competition is a classic example of a particular open innovation approach called crowdcasting; the idea is to specify the problem to be solved, and then solicit responses from a wide range of potential solvers. Often – although admittedly not in this instance – solvers come from places you might not expect; for example, when Procter & Gamble wanted help developing a particular type of dish detergent, they tapped the pioneering broadcast search platform InnoCentive, to elicit solutions. And they found it – in Perugia, Italy, where Giorgia Sgargetta, a chemist with a home laboratory came up with the solution.

Other well-known open innovation approaches include crowdsourcing (the “wisdom of the crowd” premise that often collective intelligence exceeds that of any individual expert), and swarming (the approach used to develop Wikipedia, and also in programming competitions such as this example from MATLAB).

The real value of open innovation may transcend the specific advances delivered by these approaches – rather, it may be in helping us recognize the limitations of our own knowledge, and to appreciate how much underappreciated wisdom may be out there. Embracing open innovation – even internally(!) — might be especially valuable for big corporations, as it offers the potential to disrupt traditional hierarchies and siloed thinking, and capture the value of the exceptional human capital within large companies that often remains untapped.

The other feature of the Prize4Life award worth pointing out is that it was awarded not for a cure for ALS, but rather for a biomarker, an early read of disease progression. This is important because the ability to rapidly figure out whether or not a drug is working can enable clinical trials that might otherwise be too complicated or expensive for a drug company to pursue. What Prize4Life – and other forward-thinking patient advocacy groups, such as the Michael J Fox Foundation – recognize is both the urgency and complexity of biomarker development. While medical product companies clearly embrace the concept of biomarkers, and while useful biomarkers can dramatically accelerate drug development, the process of identifying — and ultimately qualifying — adequate bioarmkers turns out to be a monumental challenge, in many ways as difficult as development of the drugs themselves. While many academic papers report candidate biomarkers, the unfortunate reality is that most are not nearly robust enough for high-stakes decision-making.

Hopefully, Dr. Rutkove’s promising biomarker will prove reliable enough to catalyze the discovery and development of new, effective medicines for ALS; Avichai Kremer, and thousands like him, cannot afford to wait much longer.

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